Want a gift to bring joy to your world? Merrigong Theatre Company recently announced its biggest ever season for 2025 and artistic director Simon Hinton has a hot tip for Christmas shoppers: Love Stories.
“A season ticket makes a really great Christmas present,” Simon said, “but in terms of individual shows I think Love Stories, which is coming up in late Feb, is probably the most obvious Christmas present show, because it's such a joyous production.”
Love Stories is an adaptation of Trent Dalton's bestselling book, a series of vignettes collected after the author took to a street corner in Brisbane to ask passers-by: “Can you please tell me a love story?”
The show premiered in Queensland in September and had an “extraordinary season”, Simon said.
“More than 20,000 people saw it in Brisbane. It's a really beautiful stage adaptation, a stunning piece of theatre. In fact, when I went up to Brisbane, I don't think I've ever seen an audience more joyous at the end of a show. People were just coming out of the theatre so uplifted.
"It’s a love letter to love, really – and all the different types of love and how important love is in our life.”
Love Stories is the first of three “hot ticket” shows coming to Wollongong for two-week runs next year. The others are the stage adaptation of Pip Williams’ bestselling novel,The Dictionary of Lost Words, in May, and political drama Julia, with Justine Clarke starring as Australia’s first woman prime minister in September.
“We've got close to 1500 people on wait lists for those shows," Simon said. "Because we sell to our season ticket holders first, so at the moment you can only buy those shows as part of season tickets.”
Individual tickets to these plays are set to go on sale next Tuesday, November 19 at 10am.
"There's a huge excitement for those blockbuster shows," Simon said.
“It's the biggest season we've ever had, in terms of the scale of the shows and the number of shows. So that's really exciting.”
The mainstage program – which kicks off in February with Bangarra Dance Theatre’s The Light Inside – will include 11 shows with wide appeal, from Bell Shakespeare's Henry 5 to Belvoir St Theatre's Scenes from the Climate Era. Younger audiences will be delighted by colourful puppets in The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show, Ratburger (from the David Walliams novel) and the return of The Listies, aka “the rock stars of the kids comedy circuit”.
The MerrigongX Artists’ Program will present innovative new works, including Kirli Saunders’ poetic journey Yhanda Djanbay (Go Slowly), Lucy Heffernan’s gig-theatre Dog People, Vaugley Adjacent’s interactive adventure Squatch Watch: LIVE and the thought-provoking Public Access, presented by The Corinthian Food Store.
Earlier this year, singer-songwriter Kay Proudlove's Dear Diary stepped up from MerrigongX to the mainstage; in 2025, it will be Josh Hinton's turn, as the young performer returns to IPAC with A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen (or How To Make the Perfect One-Pot Chicken Curry) after a successful debut in August.
For teenagers, Simon recommends A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen, Love Stories and October 2025’s high-energy acrobatic spectacle, Duck Pond by Circa. “It’s a circus riff on Swan Lake, but kind of mashed up with the Ugly Duckling and things.”
In November 2025, Simon is looking forward to a new show by the local Strangeways Ensemble.
“The Strangeways Ensemble is our ensemble of professional actors who are perceived to have intellectual disability. They make just such great, fun, original theatre. And we make a mainstage work with them every two to three years. So that's coming up, that's called The Seven, which is a great riff on horror movie-mysteries, conspiracy theories and things.
“We've also got an international work coming from New Zealand called Mr Red Light that I'm very excited about. It's a really madcap absurdist piece of theatre, kind of crazy, but wonderful.
"So it's a diverse season.”
Programming is “an inexact science”, Simon admits, but already it seems Merrigong Theatre Co. has a hit season on its hands.
“We are trying to understand what audiences will respond to, but we're also trying to bring diverse experiences to audiences and develop new audiences. So there's always that kind of balance between not just giving the audience what they want, but also things that they may not yet know they want, or they haven't been exposed to."
The big season to come is partly due to people returning to live entertainment post pandemic, but also because of the quality of theatre emerging in Australia, Simon said.
"Our feeling at the moment is that it's important to listen to audiences … but we are also really blessed in this country to have some incredible theatremakers who are making work that is vibrant and entertaining and is really attractive in a difficult economic time.
“The whole team at Merrigong is really excited about the year ahead and already, since we launched, just the response to the season is giving us great confidence that theatre-going is alive and well in Wollongong.”
For season tickets, visit the Merrigong website
